The pressures on today’s businesses are greater than ever with the desire for more, faster and better. And staying ahead of competitors is tough, especially with impending shortfalls in the labor market for highly skilled workers.  

Some organizations have turned to automation to meet those demands. But all too often, organizations limit their automation efforts on standalone, individual tasks in functional silos across disparate parts of the organization. In fact, a recent Harvard Business Review study found that only 8% of organizations have automated to any significant scale. 

Automating individual tasks can save time and money and improve customer service. Yet the real competitive advantage is in automating entire processes. If you’re serious about scaling your intelligent automation (IA) practice, you’ll need business process management (BPM).  

What Is Intelligent Automation? 

The term ‘intelligent automation’ was born out of the combination of newer technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) with other, more established technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and BPM, which completely transformed how work could be done through automation and digital capabilities. IA works by improving business processes through process automation. 

Why Is Business Process Management Important? 

Intelligent automation solves lots of customer-facing challenges, making transactions and communications more efficient, effective and productive. Intelligent automation, among many other things, delivers insights from disparate data sources and optimizes workloads to increase productivity and customer-centric services. 

But if you're just automating a bunch of disparate tasks, you’re likely not looking at the full customer journey and, as a result, missing out on exponentially higher returns.  

Challenges in business processes 

There may well be parts of a journey that aren't automatable and need human interaction. Processes can also be inconsistent across people, departments, and divisions. And as you apply IA to more complex tasks, control and governance issues may arise too. 

What Is the purpose of BPM? 

Those challenges can be overcome with a more holistic, BPM-focused approach to your intelligent automation initiatives. So why is BPM important? Because adopting BPM enables you to automate entire processes and scale your intelligent automation efforts. This end-to-end integration helps processes improve and achieves real value across your enterprise. 

If you want to unlock a real competitive advantage, you need to make BPM a part of your intelligent automation toolset. 

What Is Business Process Management? 

BPM is both a discipline and a technology. As a discipline, it covers how we study, identify, optimize, and monitor business processes to ensure they deliver the right business outcomes over time. As an IA technology, it connects processes, people, digital workers, data, and software, enabling work to be done with increased efficiency and accuracy. 

What are the benefits of business process management (BPM)? 

The benefits of BPM solutions like SS&C | Blue Prism® Chorus are:  

• Total visibility into your business 
• Helping orchestrate and manage work across the organization  
• Predicting outcomes  
• Strengthening performance  
• Optimizing standardized processes  
• Continuous work to improve business results  

Ultimately, Chorus enables businesses to scale their IA efforts across the entire enterprise. 

What Are Some Examples of Business Process Management? 

1. Process management: creates a process map modeling the entire journey for each piece of work or communication and provides an engine to execute those journeys holistically to deliver the required business outcomes. 
2. Work orchestration: automates decision-making, integrates with other applications, prioritizes, coordinates and drives work to ensure service levels are met even as business needs change. 
3. Content management: captures data from multiple channels like phone calls, electronic and handwritten forms, attachments, SMS, letters, scans, faxes, and emails, and directly plugs it into your processes for better performance and enhanced experiences. 
4. Business analytics: Provides context to data and identifies trends, exceptions, and opportunities for improving process performance. 

National Benefit Services (NBS), a U.S.-based third-party benefits administrator, was growing quickly, but aging workflow and business processes lacked flexibility and scalability, had higher than desired error rates, and required long training times. Plus, there was no holistic view of reporting and client management systems. 

SS&C Blue Prism Chorus helped drive NBS’s transformation toward a single, unified business operating model, starting with immediate chokepoints like paper flow. Better customer service resulted in all-time high satisfaction scores; and now, with over half of NBS employees using Chorus, even more process transitions are planned. 

Achieving Scale with BPM Software 

Unrealistic expectations, lack of in-house talent, and inadequate IT support can all compromise the success of an IA program. So how do you avoid these traps and achieve scale? A scalable and robust business process management software is the answer. 

A BPM-centric approach 

1. Choose the right processes for automation. You may think you understand your processes, but when you deploy BPM tools like process mining, you’ll often find employees do things hundreds of different ways. Imagine the value you can achieve by implementing the single best way to do something across your organization. 
2. Match processes to the customer (or employee) journey. It’s important to understand how your customer expects work to get done and respond to that accordingly. How is customer data coming in? Are you using agents? Are you using digital forms? If operations people don't understand how data gets to them, it’s impossible to design the right process to meet your customer and employee needs. 
3. Set realistic goals for automation. It’s vital to create achievable and measurable goals, whether it’s cost savings or improved customer experiences. 
4. Create a Center of Excellence (CoE). Your CoE looks at how you're doing automation across the business. If you don't have one, you’ll end up with a lack of governance, resulting in inconsistencies and duplication of effort from a lot of repetitive processes. 
5. Build an automation-first culture. Instilling a culture of automation should go beyond identifying areas with opportunities for cost savings and improved customer experience. 
6. Get business unit buy-in. Forrester has found that 80% of organizations surveyed expect businesspeople to take part in process optimization and automation efforts in their areas. Employees know how the work gets done. It’s critical they have a say in the design and management of your processes. If not, chances are you won’t make much headway in your efforts to scale. 

Chorus BPM in action: IFDS 

International Financial Data Services (IFDS) is a global provider of outsourced technology for their asset management clients. IFDS was looking to enhance its capability to automate and execute straight-through processing, as well as improve control over workload and resource planning. 

Now, with SS&C Blue Prism Chorus, 3,500 employees and clients have real-time access to documentation, and workloads are auto-routed across local and international teams. Replicating the BPM system in a new location is simple, and unified processes have resulted in a better client experience. 

Getting Work Done With Chorus BPM

One of the best ways to delight customers is to make interactions easier, faster, more efficient, and more effective. SS&C Blue Prism Chorus—a comprehensive business process management suite that includes digital process automation, case management, omnichannel communications, and operational analytics—helps you accelerate the way things get done in a few different ways. 

First, you can automate the handoffs between people and technology with Chorus. Using a defined set of business rules that can include policies, requirements, and conditional statements, you can proactively automate workflow, so you don't need to wait for someone to think about something before moving tasks through your process. You can then integrate other tech such as RPA and intelligent document processing (IDP) into the process for improved efficiency, speed, and accuracy. 

Second, Chorus offers a clear audit trail to support compliance and uses ML to predict if a work item might have an error. Chorus helps with reduced risks, regulatory fines, and human errors. 

Third, Chorus uniquely improves communication with customers, bringing all your interactions into one place so you know the status of any work item and can act upon it straight away. You also can build applications to ingest content and data from any channel (e.g., paper, email, data transmissions, and social) and perform outbound personalized communications with customers, partners, and vendors through the channels they prefer. 

Chorus BPM in action: Ansvar Insurance 

Ansvar is a specialist commercial insurance company in Australia. Team members handling policy endorsements and renewals relied on individual email for communication and project management. This lack of centralization was the source of many inefficiencies. Ansvar needed centralized visibility and management of all customer service activities, including communications, task allocation, and document management. 

Ansvar implemented Chorus across their Business Development, Claims, and Underwriting teams, reducing staff time in searching for documentation and customer communications. Improved workload management and enhanced customer service have led to an increase in policy renewal rates. 

The Case for One-Stop Shopping for Automation

A high level of skill is required to configure and implement straight-through processes aligned to the business. 

Many solution providers have started offering some level of BPM products and services, while BPM providers are rushing to offer RPA add-ons. But only SS&C Blue Prism offers a single source for well-established, integrated, and recognized top-tier intelligent automation. 

There are clear benefits to sourcing a complete solution from a single company, starting with saving time and money that would have been spent on two separate procurement processes. You’ll also minimize compatibility problems and have a common UX across the board. And you won't have to go back and forth between different solutions from a design, execution, management, and analytics perspective. 

The BPM Boost 

Automating tasks at an individual level is a great starting point. Beyond that, there’s a world of work to orchestrate and Chorus helps you do that. 

Implement business process management in brand-new businesses or enhance legacy processes. New companies can codify or build processes directly into software, automating workflow from the get-go. For the more mature organization, BPM can integrate processes across legacy systems so everything works seamlessly. You can reimagine processes and easily plug in other intelligent technologies like ML or IDP where necessary. 

SS&C Blue Prism Chorus gives you a systematic approach to creating better customer experiences, keeping ahead of ever-changing governance, risk, and compliance rules, and reducing operational risk. Streamline processes and keep them consistent across teams, business units, and territories.  

With common end-to-end processes across your organization, you can plug and play human and digital workers wherever work needs to be done. Continuous improvement of processes and workflow automation lets you adapt quickly to changing business needs and keep ahead of the competition.